


Once More, with Feline

by rainbowninja167



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Absurdity and Nonsense, Gen, SHOCKING that's not a tag already, the gang gets turned into cats from the movie Cats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23301904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowninja167/pseuds/rainbowninja167
Summary: "We’re cats! So what? On a scale of 1 to “apocalypse,” a little extra fur seems pretty mild. Oh! Hey! We should try jumping off things to see if we land on our feet!”
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Once More, with Feline

**Author's Note:**

> I have no defense for this, except that I have been alone inside my apartment for a _long_ time now.

“We’re under attack,” Steve announced as he strode into the common area of Avengers Tower.

The other Avengers glanced up, took in the red-and-white domestic shorthair with the face of Steve Rogers currently standing in the center of the room, and collectively sighed. Like Steve, they were each sporting fur, cat ears, a tail, and an oddly twitchy demeanor.

“What gave you that idea?” drawled Clint from the floor, where he was concentrating on batting a bottle cap from one tabby paw to the other.

“Yeah see, you only _thought_ Iron Man was my alter-ego,” added Tony as he prodded at the brown poof of fur that was his tail. “But my _real_ secret identity has always been Andrew Lloyd Webber cosplay.”

“So that was _you_ in that Starlight Express costume at the convention last year,” Clint retorted. He hit the bottle cap a little too hard and sent it skittering under a sofa.

“What can I say, musical theater is my passion,” Tony intoned with a lofty flick of his tail.

“Who is this ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’? Is he the sorcerer responsible for such a cowardly attack?” Thor’s voice emanated from a mane of ginger fluff that had bypassed “leonine” to land straight at “tribble-esque.”

“He’s definitely responsible for _something_ ,” Natasha muttered from her perch on top of a bookshelf, where she was tracking all their movements with glowing green eyes.

“Not a _Phantom_ fan, I take it?”

“Can we all focus?” Steve interjected, his air of command only slightly undermined by the absent-minded lick he gave his paw.

“We’re focused,” Clint mumbled, eyes directed intently on the spot where the bottle cap had disappeared under the sofa.

“More _specifically_ , can we focus the fact that we all got turned into cat/human hybrids overnight? Wait a second. Where’s Bruce?”

“Hiding under the table,” Tony said, not glancing up from his tablet, on which he was scribbling some complicated, tail-related calculation. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Tony. I have _whiskers_. I’m worried.”

“And very dashing they look on you, too. Y’know, not a lot of faces can pull off whiskers, but yours—”

“ _Tony_.”

“Aw, c’mon Steve, we’re cats! So what? On a scale of 1 to “apocalypse,” a little extra fur seems pretty mild. Oh! Hey! We should try jumping off things to see if we land on our feet!”

“I am prepared to undergo these trials,” Thor’s fur said solemnly. “For science.”

“Yay!” Tony cheered. “Hear that, Bruce? Science!”

The tablecloth rustled, but did not otherwise reply.

“You said you thought someone named “Andrew Lloyd Webber” might have answers for us?” Steve continued, rather desperately now. His ears twitched with irritation.

“Steve, I hate to break it to you, but musical theater has gotten a _lot_ weirder since the days of _Oklahoma!_ There were these musicals in the ‘80s that were all about spectacle and big effects. Like…’turning people into cats’ kind of effects,” Clint explained from the floor next to the sofa; he’d somehow managed to shove his entire arm under it in search of the bottle cap.

There was a beat where all the others (except Bruce) stared at Clint.

“I go to the theater! I’m _cultured_ ,” Clint said defensively. “Also, I think I’m stuck.”

“One of the _Cats_ dancers was actually a terrorist. Clint got sent to the West End to deal with it,” Natasha explained flatly.

“And interestingly? It was _not_ the cat you’d think!”

“But I still do not understand.” Thor dropped to the floor heavily, his ginger fur billowing out around him. “We are people. And at the same time, we are cats.”

“Yes,” Clint said decisively.

“This is very unlike Asgardian magic. My brother Loki, when he transforms – which he does often, you know, and actually one time, he turned himself into a horse, that—”

“Thor, buddy, you know how much we love to hear about _The Joy of Sex: Magic Horse Edition_ ,” Tony interrupted, to everyone else’s visible relief. “But Steve’s currently wedged into an Amazon delivery box, so maybe we can skim over some of the details this time.”

“If only that Doctors Without Borders charity auction had been so lucky,” Clint mumbled, as he shoved the sofa out from the wall to _finally_ retrieve his missing bottle cap.

“I’m doing what? No I’m not,” said Steve, who was indeed sitting in a small cardboard box, but seemed utterly baffled as to how he’d: a) acquired the box, or b) fit himself into it.

“My point,” Thor continued, looking as irked as a large mound of orange fluff could possibly look, “is that Loki was _all horse_ the whole time.”

“…title of Loki’s sex tape,” Clint noted, stuck his recovered bottle cap into his mouth, and chewed on it experimentally.

“This conversation is worse than living the rest of my life as a cat,” Natasha concluded.

“ _Half-_ cat,” Thor pointed out sullenly.

“Ambiguously phenotyped cat,” Tony allowed.

“Absolutely not,” said Bruce’s tablecloth.

“I’m sorry, but are we all just gonna breeze past the fact that Captain America has gone Full Maru on that box?” Tony wondered.

“I don’t know who that is,” Steve sighed. “But it just feels…calmer like this.”

“Wait, hold on, I know it’s bad form to take photos in a crisis, but I feel like there should absolutely be an exception for uncommon cuteness in the line of duty—“ Tony began fumbling for his StarkPhone, while Steve shifted uneasily on his box.

“Tony, I don’t think—“

“Ooh what’s _that_!” In an instant, Tony’s phone was utterly forgotten, as his head shot up to catch a shimmery flash of movement in the reflection of the television screen across the room, and before anyone could stop him, he’d bounded over to investigate. Which, unfortunately, in practice, meant barreling directly into the television and knocking it onto the floor.

“Um,” said Tony, sprawled amidst the shattered and twisted remains of a 65-inch flat screen. “Enemy vanquished?”

“What was that you were saying about photos in a crisis, Stark?” Natasha drawled.

“I thought there was something in this corner!” Tony shot up from the floor with an exaggerated wince.

“There’s something in _every_ corner,” came an ominous whisper from under the table.

“Wait, what’s that?” Steve cocked his head with a frown.

“Uh, I think it was Bruce—“ Clint started.

“No! Listen!”

A moment later, the rest of them heard it too: music, very quiet, but swiftly getting louder.

“Oh _no_ …” said Bruce’s table.

“Seems like you’re about to have all your Andrew Lloyd Webber questions answered, buddy,” Tony said, his tail starting to flick in gleeful time with the beat, as though it was conducting the music itself.

And then a ghostly voice began to sing:

_Do you have super strength?  
Do you wield mighty toys?  
Did you build your own heart?  
Are you first among spies?  
Do you hoard PhDs?  
Do you thwart evil ploys?  
Are you skilled with a bow?  
Do you wear a disguise?_

“Aw, guys, it’s us!” Clint cheered.

_When you take off your mask, are you still all alone?_

“Hey!”

_Do you make funny quips, to pretend you don’t care?_

“Okay, hold on.”

_Have you watched a friend die, or have you been disowned?_

“Wow. Harsh.”

_Do you know how to go to the Heaviside Layer?_

“Wait, I know this part—“ Clint began, but his voice was soon drowned out by the swell of the chorus.

_Because Avengers can and Avengers do  
Avengers do and Avengers can…_

“That doesn’t quite scan…” Tony frowned as he counted the syllables on his fingers.

“ _Please_ don’t start rhyming too,” begged Bruce’s table.

The song finally ended with a crash of drums, leaving the Avengers in shell-shocked silence.

“Okay, I take it back,” Tony finally said, clutching his tail to his chest like a security blanket. “This is definitely an apocalypse-level crisis. Also? Musicals are _mean_.”

“I do not enjoy being attacked with song,” Thor’s fur added gravely.

“ _Thank you_!” Steve exclaimed. “Oh, hey, Tony’s you’ve got a—“ Steve licked his paw and smoothed the fur on Tony’s ear. Tony yelped and struggled, but Steve only held his face still with his other paw, and Tony was forced to endure this aggressive grooming session with _extremely_ ill grace.

“There,” Steve concluded, taking a step back. “That’s—“ His eyes widened as he registered Tony, flat-furred and scowling, and finally realized what he’d been doing. “Um. So we should…we should really figure this out. Maybe if we know more about what the original musical was about…”

“Good luck with that,” Tony snorted.

“Clint?” Natasha finally suggested. “If you’re so wise in the ways of Webber, _you_ explain.”

“Ugh, fine. So there are these things called Jellicle cats…”

“Ferocious beasts?” Thor’s fur interrupted, shifting with a vaguely interested rustle.

“Some kind of weapon?” Steve tried.

“Um, no. They’re just…regular cats. But like. _Jellicle_ cats. Specifically.”

“I do not understand,” Thor’s fur said.

“And like the song said, there’s a Heaviside Layer,” Clint continued, a little more confidently now. “One of the cats goes there, and then the musical ends.”

“Okay _now_ you’re just making up words,” Steve grumbled.

“I’m not!”

“Is it ever gonna _stop_ being funny to invent pop culture references just to mess with me?”

“Nope,” Tony interjected.

“No, there really is a – it was _in_ the _song_!”

“So are we supposed to… _find_ the Heaviside Layer?” Steve asked dubiously. “To end the musical? Maybe whoever orchestrated this will be there.”

“How do you know that?” Natasha asked.

“No offense to Clint’s expertise, but I _worked_ in musical theater. I guarantee: nobody who put in the effort to transform a bunch of superheroes into cat hybrids based on a decades-old musical would resist the chance to take a final bow.”

“You make a compelling point,” Tony conceded.

“Oh no, _Cats_ logic is actually starting to make sense...” Bruce’s table whispered.

Several hours, three hairballs, and one _extremely_ humiliating encounter with a pigeon later, the Avengers (including Bruce, whom they’d finally managed to coax out from under the table with snacks) had managed to track the casting of the spell to an ordinary-looking storefront in Brooklyn. A sign on the door advertised it as “Cat School.” With no further details.

When they broke down the door, it was to find a woman sitting calmly in the center of an empty dance studio. The Avengers faltered in their attack. The woman gestured serenely to the semicircle of six folding chairs placed around her.

“Welcome to your final exam.” The woman smiled. “Please, have a seat.”

“Did you do this to us?” Bruce demanded. “Can you turn us back?”

“Of course,” the woman said, taken aback by the question. “Cat School is a transformative educational experience, but it is not meant to be permanent. It is meant to be _felt_ and _understood_. You will not need to remain a cat _physically_ in order to carry its lessons with you.”

“Oh. Well. Um. That’s…good?”

“So what is this ‘final exam’? Multiple choice, I hope; I never could get the hang of writing essays,” Tony said, dropping into his proffered seat and giving the woman a charming grin.

“Ugh, is this one of those things where you _say_ ‘exam,’ but then it ends up being a euphemism for, like, fighting some guy?” Clint groaned, while Thor’s fur perked up visibly at the prospect.

“Not at all,” the woman said with a tinkling laugh. “As with any good exam, it merely assesses what you have learned.”

“What we’ve…learned,” Natasha repeated dubiously. The woman nodded, and waved her hand as if to encourage them to elaborate. The Avengers glanced around the circle, each willing one of the others to come up with a response.

“Um. The power of…friendship?” Steve finally offered, clearly as a last resort.

The woman blinked. “Well…yes. But people don’t usually get there on the first try.”

“Well, we’re _very_ good students,” Tony said.

“And, it turns out, not terrible cats!” Clint added cheerfully.

“Well, alright,” the woman said, a bit flustered. “Then I officially declare you graduates of Cat School!”

These must have been the magic words that broke the spell, because there was a puff of glittery smoke, and when it cleared, each of the Avengers was fully human again.

“Good luck to you, Avengers,” the woman told them solemnly as she showed them out of her studio. “I hope you never forget what Cat School has revealed to you, of yourselves and also each other.”

“We will not. Thank you, wise Cat Teacher,” Thor replied, equally solemn.

“Look at it this way,” Tony said, once they were all huddled on the sidewalk waiting for Natasha to call an Uber. “At least it wasn’t Sondheim.”


End file.
